Should the Lord’s prayer be heard in public school?

The principal of a predominantly rural Alberta public school who suspended morning recitations of the Lord’s Prayer says his school is within its legal right to continue saying the prayer even as parents opposed to it say they are exploring legal options.

Sturgeon Heights School, a public school serving a largely rural Christian community on the northern edge of St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton, have said the Lord’s Prayer every morning over the loudspeakers for the past 40 years. Children who didn’t want to participate could sit it out.

Morning prayer has been the common practice at many northern rural Alberta public schools with large faith-based communities where parents have requested prayer in schools. Under an exemption to the Constitution dating back to the days of Confederation, schools have accommodated them. But last year, some parents at Sturgeon Heights began to complain that their children were being forced to listen to the prayers or risk being ostracized by their friends.

The school suspended the morning prayers this fall until the local school board could draft a policy on the issue, expected later this month.

“There’s no doubt that legally we can recite the Lord’s Prayer in the morning in our school,” said principal Garnet Goertzen “Our school board is making sure all the legislation lines up, and we have the appropriate authority in our school board to continue the practice here. That’s just going to take some time.”

It’s a debate that has been settled decades ago in other provinces, since a landmark 1988 Ontario ruling that found saying the Lord’s Prayer in public schools violated the Charter. The court also ruled that schools couldn’t get around the issue by simply giving students the option to sit it out, because having to request to be excluded from prayer was also a form of religious discrimination.

But the practice has persisted in Alberta and Saskatchewan, two provinces granted a Constitutional exemption when they joined Confederation in 1905 that protected the right to prayer in schools.

“Most of the Western world has worked out that in a pluralistic society the only way to ensure equality for all children is with a secular school system,” said parent Luke Fevin. “But somehow here in the depths of Alberta we seem to be half a century behind everybody else.”

Mr. Fevin, a secularist who said he wants his children to make up their own mind about religion, specifically tried to choose a non-religious school for his three children when he enrolled his eldest daughter in Sturgeon Heights. The school never informed him about morning prayers, he said.

“The fact that the school actually forces prayer means I now have a five -and seven-year-old who believe in God, believe that God is Christian, they believe that he listens to prayers and answers prayers,” he said. “My public school had no right to teach my children that this is the truth of the universe. This is not an anti-religious stance, this really is a freedom of religion stance.”

Since he complained, Mr. Fevin said the dispute has turned “nasty.” Friends have stopped speaking to his family and his children have been excluded from parties attended by their classmates. He proposed three solutions: replacing the prayer with a moment of silence, a “school mantra” that includes the same values of the Lord’s Prayer without the reference to a Heavenly Father, or shifting the Lord’s Prayer to the optional Christian studies program the school runs for Grades 1-6.

But he added that parents opposed to the Lord’s Prayer have also been consulting with legal advisors “about where this can go, not in specific regard to the school itself but in regard to Alberta having a conversation that it obviously needs to have.”

If the school board authorizes the prayer later this month, the principal said the school will likely survey parents on whether they want the Lord’s Prayer reinstated.

“I know if it comes down to community choice, a majority of our parents would like the Lord’s Prayer reinstated,” Mr. Goertzen said. “Our community values are a major player in the culture of this school, and I want the school to represent the community.”